


Gravity

by ungoodpirate



Series: Belated Pynch Week 2017 [8]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Day 8, Free Choice, M/M, Pynch Week, pynch - Freeform, pynchweek2017, the nitty gritty relationship stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-25
Updated: 2017-08-25
Packaged: 2018-12-19 19:55:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11905077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ungoodpirate/pseuds/ungoodpirate
Summary: Ronan, who had let possessed-Adam wrap his hand around his neck and didn’t even consider to fight back, had measured himself up against all of Adam’s ambitions and hadn’t seen how he was going win, wasn’t even going to make himself a contender if he thought it would end with Adam unhappy.---AKA Adam gets a summer internship, and Ronan and Adam have to confront what wanting different things means for the future of their relationship.---AKA, my belated day 8 fic for my belated pynch week





	Gravity

Adam weighed his phone in his hands. He had upgraded to a smart phone at the beginning of the academic year. He had needed it to keep up with his classmates, who relied on them to make study plans and stressed over lack of immediate responses to emails. It was a large expense, but Adam felt accomplished every time he slide the slim, sleek thing out of his pocket to check a message. It was a step towards that magazine cut out dream of a sleek man with a sleek car. 

The phone didn’t spontaneously get too heavy for him to hold, so Adam called the number that was dwelling on his mind. 

Ronan answered after four rings, just before his phone would’ve cut to voicemail, like he always did. Adam thought that he perfected this timing to protect his reputation in regards to phones. 

“Hey loser, what’s up?”

“Do you answer all your phone calls like that?” Adam said.

“No, that one’s just for you, babe.” 

Why did Ronan have to be so cute over the phone right now? Probably because fate hated Adam Parrish.

“I have some news,” Adam said. He took a breath. “I got offered an internship for this summer. And not a bullshit unpaid internship, but one with a paycheck and cost of living stipend. They’re seriously trying to head hunt me for after graduation next year.” 

The words stumbled out easy despite his anxiety. He was prideful about this, a chest overfilled. The anxiety came on the backend, like a bitter aftertaste. 

“That’s awesome, Parrish!” Ronan said, because he was always happy for Adam’s successes. 

Now time to break his heart. 

“Here’s the catch,” Adam said. “It’s in Boston.” He released a tense breath. “Ronan? You still there?”

“I’m here,” Ronan said, although his tone sounded like someone had just dumped cold water on him. Someone had. Adam had. “How long?”

“June 1st to the end of August.” 

“Fuck, Adam, that’s the whole summer!”

“We’ll have a week, at the end of May,” Adam said quickly. He had stared at the calendar a long time, hoping for days to be hiding there, to morph into existence by sheer force of his longing. “And technically my semester doesn’t start until after Labor Day, so we’ll have a few days extra at the end.”

“A week and a half,” Ronan spat out. He had gone from sad to a piece of striking flint. “Minus all the driving back and forth. If you didn’t want to see me this summer, Parrish, you couldn’t just said straight forward.” 

“Of course I want to see you, Ronan. You know that.” Adam wasn’t so easily deferred by Ronan’s sharp words or elbows anymore. 

They lived for summer break, the two of them. Adam came to the Barns for any significantly long break during the school year, Ronan came up to visit for a long weekend now and again, and once in awhile they met somewhere in the middle and holed up in a hotel room for a night. Summer break was a solid three months of living together, sleeping side by side, falling into a daily life routine, and it felt magical in a mundane way that Adam never thought normal life could be. 

“I haven’t said yes yet,” Adam said. 

“But you’re going to,” Ronan said. “I know you. You can’t pass this up. And I’m not going to be the one that tells you to… So take the internship, but maybe think hard about whether you actually want to come back here this summer at all.” 

#

“You’re here,” Ronan said, a beer bottle hanging loose from his fingers, as Adam came to stand before where he sat on the porch steps. The warm May evening thistled with cricket song. Ronan had not taken to rise to his feet hearing Adam’s car churn up the gravel drive, or seeing Adam get out of the drivers side. 

“You never said not to come,” Adam said. “You just strongly implied it. Yet here I am. We have a week. We’re going to figure this out.” 

Ronan stood slowly, took a swig of his drink, cricked his neck to pop a joint. He wasn’t drunk. Adam could tell. His eyes weren’t glossy and he had full composure of his movements. 

“Oh, Parrish,” Ronan said, as light as the crickets, “I thought you were smarter than this.” 

#

Spending their first night reunited in separate bedrooms wasn’t unexpected given the tension between them, but not how Adam would’ve preferred it. The last time he had been shunted into Matthew’s room was when their relationship was very new and sleeping together in the same bed was a step.

Adam slept hard and late into the next morning. He always overworked himself finals week and the drive the day before had been long. When he got up, Ronan’s bedroom door hung half open and Adam could peak in to see his bed empty. Ronan was a lot more diligent with keeping farm hours than he ever was with keeping school hours. 

Down in the kitchen, Adam had the wind knocked out of him when a hard head collided with his gut and pair of skinny arms wrapped around his middle. 

“Adam!” chimed Opal. 

It would be nice if her hugs didn’t come with the impact of a football tackle, but it was nice regardless. Adam ran a hand over her feathery hair. “Good morning to you too.” 

Not unlatching her arms, she looked up at him with her wide eyes. She didn’t say much, especially in English, but she always gave Adam the impression that she was thinking multitudes. 

“You’re here?” she said as a question. Adam had no idea what Ronan had told her, but gut felt like cement anyway.

“For the week,” he said. “Where’s Ronan?”

“Cows,” she answered. While Ronan had not yet managed to get his father’s dream cows to awake, he had dreamed and bought some farm animals of his own over the last few years. He seemed more in company amongst them than other people. 

Opal unlatched from Adam’s middle and wandered over to a cabinet, where she pulled out a jar of peanut butter. She twisted off the lid and dug two fingers in, scooping, and stuck them in her mouth. Adam supposed he would not be eating any peanut butter while in stay.

“I guess I’ll wait.” 

Adam busied himself with the things of settling in: a shower, an unpacking of his suitcase of clothes and necessities, making breakfast and then lunch and cleaning up from both. 

Ronan tromped in around three in the afternoon covered in dirt and a sheen of sweat. 

“Shower,” he grunted upon seeing Adam waiting with a mug of coffee on the living room couch. 

“You’re avoiding me.” 

“A farm doesn’t run itself.”

“It did every other first day back I’ve had here,” Adam said. 

Ronan stomped up the staircase.

#

Adam found Ronan again a half hour later, in fresh clothes, in his bedroom, sorting CDs into collapsing piles on his bed. 

Adam leaned on the doorframe, arms crossed. “I know you’re mad at me, but your cleaning just to avoid me? This is ridiculous.” 

He had hoped the joke would break something loose. It failed. 

Ronan tossed a CD case into the far corner of his bed. 

“Look,” Adam said. “I get you’re upset. So am I. I’ve been looking forward to summer here since winter break. But we’ll make it work. We made it work all school --”

Ronan tossed the rest of the CD cases he was holding down onto the bed spread and they clattered apart like a pane of shattering glass. Ronan stared at the he had made for a prolonged moment, fiddling with his leather bands. Adam stared at Ronan doing all of that. 

“You don’t get it,” Ronan said. 

“What don’t I get?”

Ronan ran a hand over his two day’s worth of stubble, then turned to face Adam straight on. “This was our last summer.” 

It hit Adam as soon as Ronan said it. Of course he’d known, but he hadn’t really contemplated… Perhaps he could be forgiven for overlooking it. After all, for the last fifteen years of his life he had went to school and had a summer break. 

“Next year you graduate,” Ronan said. “No more summer breaks. Winter breaks. Spring breaks. I know you’re overachieving, workaholic ass. The only time you’ll take a break is when security drags you from the building.”

“Things are going change,” Adam said. He had anticipated graduating. He already spoke at length with his advisor about his options, attending a lecture hosted by the university on job hunting, and went to enough schmoozing alumni events to make Gansey proud. He got a paid internship.

As his future was chugging forward, he had forgotten what was being pulled behind. 

Adam cleared his throat. “We’ll make it work.” 

“When you graduate --”

“Why are you so stuck me graduating!”

“Because you’re not coming back!” 

The accusation hung heavy in the air. 

Ronan shrugged one shoulder. “I mean, sure. For a visit or two…”

“I’ll come back,” Adam said, tinged with offence. He stepped a little into the room. “What? Do you think I’m going to graduate and forget about you? Or trade you in for some Ivy League model? Because, fuck, Ronan, I thought you knew better than that. That’s not what I want. I want you.” 

Adam had met plenty of interesting people during his years at Yale. He met attractive people. He met people interested in him. He met attractive people he might have been interested if not one all consuming factor: he was in love with Ronan. 

It wasn’t a casual sort of love. It wasn’t a casual sort of relationship. It wasn’t like the other students who had high school significant others back home. Ronan knew Adam in the complicated, jagged no one from Adam’s post-secondary life ever could. 

Although Henrietta was a skin he tried to remove, it was part of him. The kid that was broken. The kid that survived. The magician. The mastermind. With his hands and eyes possessed. With his anger. With the way he could still smile after everything he’s been through. 

Ronan Lynch knew Adam Parrish. But not only knew him, and accepted him, and loved him despite it. He loved him for it. 

“But you’re not moving back,” Ronan said. “You hate this place.” 

“I --”

“Not the Barnes,” Ronan said. “But Henrietta. Rural Virginia. There’s nothing for you here.” 

“There’s you,” Adam said. 

“Other than me.” 

There wasn’t anything else here for Adam than that. Ronan, the Barnes, and Opal were an oasis within a wasteland. If he was satisfied with Henrietta, he could’ve become a fancy mechanic for Boyd and made decent enough money to live on. If he was satisfied with not being the best, by his own merit, he could stay at the Barnes and live on Ronan’s dime and not worry about anything like ambitions. But Adam wasn’t satisfied with that. Taking either of those options would’ve meant subjecting himself to a drought. 

“You’ll be off to Boston or New York or somewhere else in fucking New England, working, living that nouveau rich life of your dreams. I’ll be here, where I love.” Ronan sat on the edge of his bed with no care for the CD cases he dislodged to the floor. “It’s not like I could leave even if I wanted to, with the animals, and guarding dad’s secrets and Opal. But I don’t want to. This is the one place I feel at peace.” 

Adam sat down beside him. 

“We could still do long distance,” Adak said, although it sounded like dust even to him. 

“Most people endure long distance relationships to make it to the point where they get to be together for real,” Ronan said. “I want to be with you for fucking real, but I just don’t see how that’s going to happen… Face it, Parrish, you’re outgrowing me.” 

What an accusation to face. It wasn’t a ‘I don’t love you anymore’ or ‘Let’s break up’ but instead of cruel side effect of what Adam always wanted. Adam wanted to outgrow Henriette, and so he had, and everything else. 

“But I love you,” Adam countered, for himself more than Ronan. Didn’t love solve all? Shouldn’t it? 

“I love you too,” Ronan said, sounding tired. “But maybe that’s not all there is.” 

“What else is there?” 

“Choice,” Ronan said, staring straight forward. “But we chose differently.” 

Adam stood up, viciously quick, knocking a whole other cascade of CD cases to the floor, one spring open as it bounced off his toes. This was how Adam’s anger came, boiling low in his gut and then exploding. He had inherited this from his father. 

“No. Fuck this. Fuck this all, Ronan. I don’t know if jealous that I’m doing things without you, or your bitter about summer --” 

“I’m not jealous!” Ronan snapped back, although he remained seated. “I’m just trying to be the fucking responsible one for once, making us talk about our relationship. This isn’t easy for me.” 

“Oh, like this is easy for me, you telling me how we’re not gonna work because I’m outgrowing you. I’ve known Ronan Lynch to step away from a fight, but if you’re not going to fight for us, then maybe I have outgrown you.”

“Fuck off!” 

“I going right now.” 

Adam stormed out, of the room and of the barns, and got into his car and drove away. 

#

He came back. 

It was dark, almost a solid darkness at the Barnes except for the moon above and a lamp left on in the Barnes front window. Adam wondered if Ronan had left it on on purpose, or Opal had, or either of them did it on accident.

He had spent the afternoon and evening channeling his inner Ronan, driving fast and angry in whatever direction he could find: an hour north, two hours back south, through town more than once, like hoping to find it palatable and just hating it all the more. Thinking about how wrong Ronan was, and then eventually arriving at the conclusion that maybe he was right. 

 

Adam crept inside. 

He crept upstairs. He crept to Ronan’s room, where the door hand open half an inch and all he had to do was push.

Ronan was lying on his pillow, eyes shut, with those bulky headphones over his ears. The beat of the music would be heard in wisps from where Adam stood. This probably didn’t mean Ronan sleeping, just that he laying their trying to. 

When Adam pressed the door open wider, Ronan’s eyes blinked open. He sat up in bed, taking the headphones. 

“You’re back,” he said. 

As soon as Adam heard those words, he broke. 

Adam Parrish wasn’t a person who cried. When you were raised with a constant refrain of ‘stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about’ with an actual follow up on it, you learned long ago not to cry. 

Even now, he wasn’t some sobbing mess, but he felt like one with his eyes watering and the painful hitch in his chest. 

“You were right,” he said, digging his palms into his eye sockets. “I want you and I want everything I’ve worked for… and those… and those are in two different places.” 

He sucked in a breath and couldn’t seem to get enough air. 

A warm arm found its way across his shoulders, bringing him close, bringing him down to the bed. 

Ronan pressed his lips to Adam’s temple. “Listen up,” he said, into Adam’s good ear. “We still have the rest of this week, and the half week in September, Thanksgiving break, winter break -- that’s a whole month -- and spring break…”

“That’s barely any time all, compared to the rest of our lives.” 

“The rest of our lives were never guaranteed.” 

Adam laid his head on Ronan’s shoulder. Was this what Ronan had felt every time Adam had left the Barnes for college, had he been counting down, feeling the stitches be ripped apart. 

How painful it was, to be pulling out of each other’s orbits. 

#

“You’re up early,” Ronan said, as he walked into the kitchen, keeping with his farmer’s hours. 

“I didn’t really sleep,” Adam said. He had his laptop open on the table. 

Ronan lifted the two-thirds empty coffee carafe. “I can see that.”

“I had an idea,” Adam said. “And I had research it, or I would go crazy waiting for morning.”

Adam turned the computer screen for Ronan to see the accomplishment of his late night panic: a google map with a cluster of Adam-researched pins stuck in it. 

“What am I looking at?” Ronan said. 

“That’s how many engineering jobs there are around this area. DC, Richmond, Arlington, Baltimore. Too far to commute day-to-day, but I could come back here every weekend. That’s more than we have now.” 

Ronan’s expression was unreadable, mostly just tired, and like a engine trying to start. 

“And a lot of these places make you take your vacation days,” Adam continued with a frantic energy to explain. The too-much coffee was making him jittery, and he had reached that beyond tired place where he was just wired. 

“I was looking up employee reviews online. They don’t want you to burn out, and they want the best talent. Or… have you ever heard of a flex schedule. You can work four ten hour days and have a three day weekend every weekend.”

Ronan squinted between the computer screen and Adam’s face. “What about Boston?” he asked. 

“Don’t you get it!” Adam said, exited, standing from the stool. He grabbed Ronan by the front of his shirt. “I don’t care about Boston. I’ll do the internship, but if they offer me a job, it doesn’t mean I have to take it. It will look good on my resume one way or the other.” 

“But you hate --”

“Virginia?” Adam said. “I thought I did, once. I thought I was going leave everything about my past in the rearview mirror and never look back, but… that was before.” 

“Before…” Ronan repeated, like it was a riddle. 

“Before I had friends. Before you. Before I realized I don’t have to be ashamed of where I come because I survived, I made it, despite everything being stacked against me.” 

“I feel like Gansey’s been trying to tell you that for years.” 

“Well, I’m stupid sometimes.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” Ronan muttered.

Adam tugged him by his shirt, and they shared a kiss that was long overdue, since yesterday, since spring break when they were last united, since they had been avoiding this conversation. 

“Did you really think, when it came to choice between you and my career, that I would choose my career so easily?” Adam asked, after their mouths had parted. 

Ronan eyes skated to the side, out of contact, and that was all the answer Adam needed. 

Ronan, who had let possessed-Adam wrap his hand around his neck and didn’t even consider to fight back, had measured himself up against all of Adam’s ambitions and hadn’t seen how he was going win, wasn’t even going to make himself a contender if he thought it would end with Adam unhappy. 

“You’ve changed since you’ve gone to Yale,” Ronan said, “Not in bad ways.” 

Something like weight filled his chest. A significant weight, but not a bad one. Adam had changed since going to Yale, but he had been changing for a while now, from the beginning of high school to the end, from first meeting Gansey until now, from making his bargain with Cabeswater to losing the connection, from the beginning of senior year to graduation, from his first kiss with Ronan to the kiss just a second ago. 

Adam Parrish was an evolving creature, but he wasn’t alone in that. 

“You’ve changed too,” Adam said. Ronan had said himself. He was at peace here. It was why Adam had never even considered, in his desperate search for a third option to keep them together, asking Ronan to leave the Barns. 

“I think what you said about choice was right,” Adam said. So much of life had been built on hard choices, on choices made between a rock and a hard place. This one, compared to all that, was surprisingly easy. “And I’m choosing both.” 

“Well,” Ronan said, looking at with an expression so soft it broke every concrete block Adam was built out of. “Why don’t you choose to get some sleep before you die. It would be fucking pity if it happened so soon after you worked all this out.”

**Author's Note:**

> So, I was initially uninspired for Day 8's 'free choice' prompt but then decided to take 'choice' as the prompt and this was born. It kind of got away from me and it didn't go exactly in the direction I thought, but it originally didn't have a happy ending, so there's that.


End file.
